Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S.

by Kitty Calavita

"Inside the State" takes the reader behind the scenes inside the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) - one of the most secretive agencies in the federal government, and one which wields enormous discretionary power. Kitty Calavita documents the internal decision-making processes of the INS that have shaped US policy, and places the current reform movement in historical and theoretical perspective. Connecting structural contradictions in the political economy to the details of agency decision-making, "Inside the State" aims to provide in-depth analyses of the links between abstract theories of the state and real-life political actors and institutions.

256 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 2010

About the author

Kitty Calavita is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently studying the implementation of immigration policy in Italy and Spain. Much of her work examines the interplay of political, ideological, and economic factors in the implementation of immigration law and in the treatment of white-collar crime, and in both cases it explores what these dynamics can tell us about relations of power and state processes. Her recent article, "The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and 'Passing:' Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882-1910," Law and Social Inquiry (2000), links the everyday dilemmas of frontline immigration inspectors to contradictory assumptions about the nature of race, class, and identity. Her book, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe, published by Cambridge University Press, will be available in January, 2005.

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides an administrative history of the INS during the bracero program. This book gives you a sense of how and why the INS operated, how it dealt with growers, and how it dealt with other agencies (mostly the Department of Labor). The author explains “This dialectical model posits that the political economy of a capitalist democracy contains within it specific contradictions, and that law often represents the state’s attempt to grapple with or reconcile the conflicts derived from those contradictions. To the extent that the contradictions are entrenched in the political-economic structure, the attempted resolutions are doomed to failure but give rise to further conflict.” Here, the attempt to reconcile capitalist contradictions that the INS is forced to deal with is the bracero program. The author situates herself against a purely structuralist reading which would see the state acting in accordance with the capitalist (growers). Instead, she argues that the state is not monolithic and while its desires overlap with the capitalists quite a bit, it is capable of acting in its interests. She shows the way that government divisions played out and the way that INS was interested in its public image around undocumented immigration. Replacing undocumented workers with documented braceros helped their public image and catering to the growers’ wants kept the growers on board with the program. This book will provide you with oodles of details about the history of the bureaucratic juggernaut we deal with in struggle for all humans to be treated with dignity and to reject the idea that any human being can be illegal.

On a side note, she seemed completely ignorant of the history of asian exclusion. This bothered me.